Butler and Dalloway

Time and memory develop as two different concepts in both Mrs. Dalloway and Kindred. Intersecting at certain points, memory and time often play contradicting antithetical roles. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, the repeated phrase “The leaden circles dissolved in the air” mark moments when the narrative zooms out of the individual stream of thought into a larger consciousness. The layers of individuals collapse effortlessly and the boundaries between people’s thoughts are erased when the bell tolls the time and draws attention to the transience of the moment. Time is the unifying force while memory works in alienating ways. “As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls” (Woolf 20). While everybody in the park perceives the same birds and gulls, anchored by the tolling of eleven, individual perceptions differ to even the most distinguishable detail, such as the word the smoke letters were making, turning a moment of unity into pockets of disconnection. Woolf portrays a society in which everyone is moving in the same direction but in completely closed spheres. These spheres represent the insular quality of human experience and memory and how communication can fail to transmit these ideas to another individual. In the same park, the proximity of Maisie Johnson to Rezia and Septimus allows for a brief connection but the couple are immediately absorbed into the narrative of Maisie Johnson’s life. She remarks “so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent’s Park on a fine summer’s morning fifty years ago” (Woolf 25). Memory is a continuous track upon which the human mind can traverse in an infinite amount of variation, while time is a set of discrete set moments moving forth, joining complete strangers in the human condition. This realization estranges individuals from a complete understanding, but is undeniably freeing for Clarissa Dalloway. She, after watching the old woman in the house next door, absorbs the loneliness of the human soul and the inherent singleness of a life and continues to fight against it by throwing her parties in an effort to preserve dialogue and communication between individuals.

Octavia Butler works memory and time differently in Kindred by structuring the narrative to make both memory and time intensely alienating for Dana Franklin. Transporting Dana from 1976 to the 1800s emphasizes the disconnection between her experiences and those around her. Also, her perception of time becomes extremely warped as 5 years there translates to several weeks in the present day.  The flip flopping of times produces a character that never feels at home in either time but instead must put on a mask to conceal both the physical and mental lesions. She learns to lie to doctors at the hospital about her arm and learns to lie to Rufus and Alice about her whereabouts. The tissue of lies she weaves around her person is so thick that a connection is impossible. However, despite the difference in memory and time, Dana manages to understand and even empathize with her surroundings. “Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (Butler 134). Weylin is no more a monster than what his society deems him to be and it is this realization that topples Dana from her position of omniscience.  Dana’s moments of insight into the parallels between her present and past worlds, completes a bridge across space and time that brings down her barriers. However, she requires some division in order to protect her identity and prevent it from being absorbed into the cultural fabric. “I played the slave, minded my manners probably more than I had to” (Butler 91). By playing the slave, Dana is preserving her life at the expense of her beliefs. While she has occasional rebellious acts, such as teaching Carrie and Nigel how to read, her inability to defy Rufus at the expense of denying her own future, leaves her at an impasse. Even amidst the torture, starvation and degradation, the connection between her past ancestor and her current experiences, allows Dana to relook and revise her identity and come to terms with the violent history that brought her into the world. In the beginning she had hoped that Alice and Rufus had peacefully coexisted but soon realizes the foolishness and naiveté of that belief. By placing Dana in her own history, “there was no distance at all” between her and past events (Butler 221). So while, Dana is apart from her natural place and time, she is able to meld into society and successfully participate in an abhorrent system. The ease into which she slides into the roles calls into question her entire identity and whether she was the product of her century. By collapsing the 1900s and 1800s together, Butler allows her to partake in a renewal and recovery of identity.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott.Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. 25th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

Butler and Haneke

In attempting to compare/contrast Butler’s work with Haneke’s, I was surprised to find myself focusing more on the “science fiction” label that is so readily applied to Kindred than the striking formal differences between the two narratives (namely, that one is written and the other filmed).  Acknowledging the fact that I’ve had relatively limited experience with science fiction books or films, I looked for a simple definition of the term, and found that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “science fiction” as: “Imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and involving space or time travel” (OED online).

I acknowledge that a one-sentence attempt to define an entire creative genre is inherently reductive, but I do think that the language used here poses some interesting questions, the most pressing of which is this: what qualifies Kindred as science fiction, whereas Caché (or even something as characterized by “spectacular environmental changes” as Time’s Arrow) is not as readily classified as such?  Certainly, Butler’s novel seems a more obvious recipient of the label simply by virtue of the fact that the characters physically travel backwards through time, and that they acknowledge the strangeness of such a rupture.  However, in a sense, the characters in Caché do the same thing—they rewind the tapes, relive moments of the past that often occurred beyond the bounds of their own experience (as is the case when Anne Laurent “experiences” Georges’s conversation with Majid by viewing the tape), and seem to find this backward time-travel as far beyond their own control as do Dana and Kevin, and just as derailing to their present lives.  A tension develops in both works, bred solely by this uneasiness surrounding the moments of backward travel—when will the next tape come? When will Dana be wrenched back to the Weylin house?

 

I suppose one striking difference could arise when considering the notion of the time-traveler’s agency in changing, or setting the course of, the “past.”  That is, because Dana has the power to save and heal Rufus, her relationship with the antebellum South into which she finds herself thrust does seem a bit different than that between Georges’s and Anne’s relationship to their filmed past.  However, I have to wonder (strictly speaking within the constructed frame of the narrative) whether such a difference is actually as glaring as it seems.  That is, before the audience even begins to learn of Rufus and the many woes he brings to Dana’s life, the Prologue alerts us to the story’s outcome—whatever trials we, as readers, are about to witness, Dana has survived to tell the story, so we know that she must have been successful in one way or another. As the story develops, as we come to realize that her mission is in fact to secure her own birth, this image of her limbless—but, above all, living—body accompanies our reading minds throughout all of the trials posed in the novel; in that sense, experiencing Dana has actually been deprived of this agency by narrating Dana (at least insofar as the character possesses agency in the audience’s mind).  In light of that consideration, time-travelling Dana actually seems to exert the same level of narrative influence over my reading mind as Georges and Anne, with whom I experience the story as a sort of co-observer (in the sense that the story—at least the story of the tapes—unfolds for all of us at the same time).

 

One could also claim that subject matter determines whether or not a work is classified as “sci-fi,” based on the fact that Dana travels an incredible distance into the “historical” past (as opposed to a “personal,” experienced past).  Again, though, that seems a bit hazy to me—as readers, we experience Dana’s entire story (with the exception of the Prologue and Epilogue) along one narrative timeline, even though she shuttles between eras.  In Caché, on the other hand, the viewer himself/herself travels back and forth through time—the dream sequences and flashbacks (if that’s how you interpret them) transport the audience, not necessarily the experiencing characters, through “spectacular environmental changes.”  This might be a bit of a stretch, but, at the level of narrative framework, I’m not convinced that Butler’s work possesses an inherently stranger or more fantastical relationship to time than Haneke’s.

With that in mind, my question might now shift to: what is the difference between a work of science fiction (I’ll limit myself to the more “realistic” works that, like Kindred, maintain relatively recognizable character and setting details—no aliens or space travel—and rely mostly on time travel for their fantastical characteristics) and a work that relies heavily on memory, a kind of interior (and, for the reader, “real”) time travel in its own right?

Butler and Woolf

 

The protagonists in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are all acted upon by larger societal forces, like gender, slavery & racism, and war. These characters are not only acted upon but inextricably tied to these outside forces such that they have a major impact on the way they go about their lives. Clarissa Dalloway, for example, is forced to live vicariously through her husband because she is a woman in post WWI England. The bitter Peter remarks, “With twice [Richard’s] wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life” (Woolf 75). Similarly, Dana worries about the limits of her guardianship over Rufus because she is a black woman. She says, “I was the worst possible guardian for him – a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children” (Butler 68). However, despite these constraints, Dana manages to subvert both gender and racial norms. She wears pants in a society of women who only wear long dresses and skirts. She also manages to get Rufus to stop using the n-word. Interestingly, these two subversions are because she is from another, more progressive time. She merely brings social and cultural norms of her time with her to the early 1800’s and inflects these values to the people around her as much as she can.

One of the ever-present forces acting on all the characters in both of these novels is time. In Woolf this is made clear by the constant references to clocks striking, beginning on the second page of the novel, with “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Woolf 4). Thinking about time as it passes in the present also implies thinking about time in the past, which is the realm of memory. Mrs. Dalloway is full of memories that ebb and flow throughout the course of the day. This infusion of past with present leads Clarissa to think about herself as dual, wholly her past self and her present self. She says, “ For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms…” (Woolf 42). This same sense of being wholly dual is made literal in Kindred. Dana is a woman from the 70’s thrust into a world of slavery in the early 19^th century. She is completely of her time but also totally in the world of the 1800’s, because it is from there that her ancestors emerged. Dana fights against the idea of being a part of the cruel time of her ancestors, saying “I desperately wanted to go home and be out of this” (Butler 148). This moment comes about midway through the book, and as a reader, it made me think that perhaps one can never really “be out of this” in the way Dana desired. Being past something, especially something historically traumatic like slavery does not mean that one can remove one’s self from it and its consequences. Rather, it becomes something that must be reckoned with on a daily basis, a process which gets represented (albeit in different ways) throughout both Kindred and Mrs. Dalloway. 

 

Butler and Wolfe

Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Virgina Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway treat very different subject matter. The time periods encompassed, the range of characters explored, and the time spans of the novels all differ drastically. However, both intimately explore the relationship of memory to human connection, both in personal relationships and on the scale of larger communities.

We first see this in Kindred when Dana returns home from her first trip to see Rufus. In order to re-connect with Kevin, she “remembered it all for him—relived it in detail” (Butler 15). In order for her to accept the reality of what had occurred and to integrate herself back into the 1900s, she needed Kevin to have an understanding of where she had been and what had occurred. As her visits to the past grow in length and intensity and Kevin begins to have his own experiences in the 1800s, the importance of sharing these memories and experiences grows. We see a similar need for concrete connection in Mrs. Dalloway, particularly in Rezia and Septimus’ relationship. Septimus’ shellshock forces a separation in this couple much as the forced time travel separates Kevin and Dana. Though Rezia and Septimus’ separation is not physical, it is just as real. For Rezia the space between her and Septimus is palpable, as she proclaims “to love makes one solitary” (Wolfe 22). Probably the happiest moment for the couple occurs shortly before he dies, when the tangible experience of making a hat together becomes a moment for Rezia to hold on to in their relationship. While making the hat with her, “he had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat” (141). She needs this moment of connection a reminder of the value of their relationship in the midst of all the loneliness Septimus’ illness causes her.

Shared experiences allow for personal connection, but an ever-present lack of complete understanding forces compromise. As Sally recognizes at the dinner party, “she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?” (88). Even in the best of circumstances, one cannot know all that another person experiences. When the situation is especially complicated, as it is for Rezia and Septimus or Dana and Kevin, the couples must do the best they can to share enough of their lives to maintain some level of intimacy. When Kevin and Dana are desperately trying to connect and re-adjust to life in the 1900s after their longest separation, Kevin’s questions lead Dana to attempt to explain why she would kill Rufus if he tried to rape her. Her explanation of the necessity of forcing Rufus to accept her at least on some level as a person only partially reaches Kevin, but she acknowledges the limits of her ability to connect with him. She accepts that he can never fully comprehend her decision, but “That felt like truth. It felt enough like truth for me not to mind that he had only half understood me” (Butler 246).

Much as Septimus’ mental illness forces a distance between him and Rezia, the social acceptance of the notion that blacks are sub-human in the 1800s forces a distance between Kevin and Dana. This distance manifests itself in their relationship while they are living together in Rufus’ house through their vastly disparate, though both terrible, experiences of life in the 1800s. Dana recognizes the discrepancy in their experiences in Kevin’s response to her comments about the cruelty of what happens to the natives in the West, noting “He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately” (97).

On a broader level, the same forces of mental illness and racism which inhibit connection in these intimate relationships can hake difficult the moments of connection that unite communities. In Mrs. Dalloway we see several such moments of unity. The Prime Minister driving by interrupts all normal activities, such that “when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument … could register the vibration,” yet the change was tangible, “for the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound” (Wolfe 17-18). In this moment, as all other activities are interrupted, the whole city is united in a moment of nationalistic calm. All across London “strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (17). And yet Septimus is unable to take part in this connectivity, for the jolt of the car’s backfiring pulls him back in time to the explosions of the war. In Kindred Dana experiences a similar disconnect as she recognizes the forces pulling her and Kevin apart as the very forces preventing any large-scale sense of connection between blacks and whites. The de-humanizing nature of slavery breaks these shared moments of communal consciousness, and Dana’s experiences in the past let her appreciate how fragile this connectivity is. She tells Kevin, “The ease seemed so frightening … now I see why” (Butler 101). The ease with which social forces allow people to disregard the ties of shared experience and humanity scare her, with good reason.

Both of these texts use formal choices of perspective and chronology to showcase how ingrained and yet fragile human connection is, exploring questions of community and loneliness through these two couples and the larger communities they inhabit.

– Hanna Torrence

Butler and Amis

            Time’s Arrow and Kindred have many fascinating parallels. In both accounts the narrator is a kind of outsider looking into an unfamiliar world. In Time’s Arrow, the unfamiliarity comes from the reverse chronology, and in Kindred, it comes from the familiar-yet-unfamiliar setting of the antebellum South (part of the point of Butler’s book is to show how knowing the history of slavery doesn’t hold a candle to living that history). Both novels take a basic, fantastical premise and quickly set up the “rules” of the two stories’ worlds, so that instead of being marred down in the plausibility or believability of the story (a problem that sometimes crops up in science fiction), we buy into these new worlds with ease and interest. The two narratives begin in moments of confusion, for both the reader and the characters. Neither Dana nor Kevin know how her gory accident happened (11), and the narrator in Time’s Arrow also cannot figure out what’s going on in the beginning: “Wait a minute. Why am I walking backward into the house? Wait. Is it dusk coming, or is it dawn? What is the—what is the sequence of the journey I’m on? What are its rules?” (6) (Interestingly, when Dana time travels, she too confuses dusk and dawn at one point,

            It should be acknowledged that there is at least as much that distinguishes Time’s Arrow from Kindred as there is elements that are similar. The formal similarities pretty much start and end at their both having a 1^st person narrator and being divided into books or chapters (for Time’s Arrow has a strict linearity and Kindred’s narratives jumps around). And in terms of content, Butler deals with race, gender, and intersections—issues that receive much less weight in Time’s Arrow. But still, both stories deal with chapters of history that become a kind of collective traumatic experience for an entire group (Jews, blacks): the Holocaust and American slavery. Butler even compares the two at several points in the story. When Dana Franklin gets tired of reading about slavery, she reads some books on WWII and turns to a “book of excerpts from recollections of concentration camp survivors,” stories about “every possible degradation.” It was as though, Dana remarks, “the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred” (116-7).

            Both novels deal with abnormal concepts of temporality. In Kindred, time passes at different paces for when Kevin or Dana is in 1976-77 or the early 19^th century, and even the logic of that becomes distorted, for example when Dana returns to the past for the third time, when she says that even though she “had been away from this place for only a few days,” she “beg[ins] to feel—feel, not think—that a great deal of time had passed for [her] too” (127). She also is compared several times to a ghost, and by coming in and out she possesses a kind of supernatural power that her break from normal time gives her. In Time’s Arrow (the title of which provides its own statement on temporality), the narrator considers the same problem: “Once life is running, though, you can’t end it….We’re all here for the duration. Life will end. I know exactly how long I’ve got. It looks like forever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me—and only me” (88).

            Both novels also ask how culpable one person can be for a societal wrong. Neither Amis nor Butler give a totally clear-cut answer. Dana, when she goes back in time, feels the need to try to educate Rufus and to keep him from turning into his father, a task that Kevin may be in vain, for “after all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone” (83). He, and the reader too, feels that she is, perhaps, “gambling with history” (83), a notion that plot events sometimes seem to corroborate (like when Rufus betrays Dana on several occasions) but elsewhere challenge (like when Rufus lets his half-black son call him Daddy) (83). So can Dana change history or not? At first she seems motivated to fight—and pushes Kevin to do so as well—eventually educating the young slaves to read and write. But she also convinces Alice to be willingly (as opposed to violently) raped by Rufus, and later, Alice says, “That’s what you for—to help white folks keep niggers down” (167). In Time’s Arrow, we wonder the same thing, because the narrator is perhaps even more omnipotent. He echoes Dana’s desires to make the effort to fight even if it’s pointless: “You’d think it might be quite relaxing, having (effectively) no will…Yet there is always the countervailing desire to put yourself forward, to take your stand as the valuable exception. Don’t just go along. Never just go along” (41). And yet, going along is the easy thing to do. “The ease seemed so frightening,” Dana muses. “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (101).

            There is too much thematic overlap of the two books for one essay, unfortunately, for there are other important similarities that I could otherwise try to shed more light on. These include the question of what is ‘home’ (Dana and Kevin have just moved into a new place when the time-traveling begins, and so they never quite feel like they belong in any place; similarly, Tod T. Friendly moves a lot in his story, eventually all the way to Europe); the multiple examples of character doubles (Tod and Tod’s narrator/conscience, Alice and Dana—who are described as “two halves of the same woman,” 228—Rufus and Tom, Kevin and Rufus, etc.); and also the important point that history repeats (e.g. Butler’s careful pointing to apartheid in South Africa, the countless repetition and cycles in Tod’s life). There is also, finally, the logical and thematic question of hindsight that both Butler and Amis consider—in Time’s Arrow, our narrator has a chronic and, indeed, maddening inability to recognize why things don’t “make sense,” despite many clues he does absorb, which makes us wonder if something like Auschwitz could have happened in the first place because of this blindness at the scale of the individual. But even Dana, with her perfect hindsight, with her history book that Rufus burns, cannot do anything. Her impotence is built into the very logic of time travel. For she’s stuck in a loop—she must travel in time to do things that will ensure she will be born so she can travel back in time to do them all over again. Perhaps Dana would find relief in the simple arc of a shooting arrow, no matter the direction. 

-Andrew M.

Butler and Amis

Butler’s Kindred and Amis’s Time’s Arrow, both move backward in time to appalling moments in history, slavery in the United States and the Holocaust, looking at the “nature of the offense.” The alternative title for Amis’s book comes from a quote from Primo Levi, a quote I found to be most illuminating when considering the intentions and stylistic choices of Kindred.

In his book, The Reawakening Levi says (pardon the block quote, I struggled with how much I should include and felt, considering Levi’s use of long sentences, that this part was necessary in its entirety):

So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain within us for ever, and in the memories of those who saw it, and in the places where it occurred and in the stories that we should tell of it. Because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better that us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offense, that spreads like a contagion.

           

            At first, I had a difficult time understanding Butler’s intention and why she used time travel to guide our thinking. Historical fiction wants the reader to review the social conditions of a certain period. Why didn’t Butler choose to stay only within the genre of historical fiction, or if she wanted more of a connection, write a neo-slave narrative? Why use science fiction, or more specifically, why use time travel?

After reviewing the quote from Levi, it seems that one of the aims of Kindred is to not to review history passively but to have a member of “our generation”, with the privilege of retrospective knowledge, actively experience slavery and report their findings. We don’t just absorb the information from a distance. We aren’t reading a creative form of a textbook. We have a point of comparison within the text to draw from.  We have someone from our own time there on the ground to engage with the surroundings and not just take in what’s happening around her but also, reacts to these events. On page thirty-six, when Alice’s father is whipped in front of his family, with Dana on the ground near by, crying because she is so close she can smell his sweat, we also feel the impulse to react in a similar way because she is a women with a way of thinking relatable and similar to ours.

Another thought…

The actions, thoughts, and reasons, the nature of the offense, of the antebellum South seems to be isolated to that time. We have learned from our mistakes, we have moved forward and we won’t commit those evils again. However, it seems that it might be incurable and that this state of nature might be innate in the sense that it just crops up in different forms, all shaped by the new sphere of thought of the time. I interpret, Butler and Amis to be making similar moves in the novels. The conscience of Odilo/John/Hamilton/Tom and Dana as a representation of a conscience seems to be moving us backward in time to get to this state of nature, where there is a feeling of predestination and inescapability.

For the sake of length, I will end here. If there are any questions, please feel free to ask. 

-Stephanie Koch

Butler and Ishiguro

If Butler’s Kindred can be read as a collapse of the boundaries of space and time in order to expose the ugliness of the past, then Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day can be seen as a work that similarly manipulates and conflates the past and present to obscure rather than reveal the trauma of the past.

The Remains of the Day is narrated by Stevens in the past tense as he recollects the collective national memory of England and its role in WWII and its collective fall after the Suez Crisis. He has the hindsight of age to look back on his own culpability in being completely passive at Darlington Hall, where above all he valued his embodiment of his role as a butler. The narrative takes on his tone of proper restraint, of dutiful calmness, and regards Lord Darlington’s collusion with the Nazi’s through a similar lens that is blurred by his commitment to servitude.

A comparison between these works highlights how each work deals with the idea of servitude. Kindred’s foray back into time places Dana directly in the history of slavery and racial subjugation while Stevens in The Remains of the Day avoids explicit reference to both the context of the fall of Great Britain as an empire and Lord Darlington’s Nazi sympathies. Stevens has the choice to present a revisionist version of his past to the readers, but Dana has arguable no agency in her immersion into her family’s history as she is forced to make sure Hagar is born to ensure her own future existence.

At the formal level, the narrative tense, the temporal immediacy of these two works places them in opposition that extends to their content. The agency of the main characters is also directly opposed as Dana is dragged into the years of slavery while Stevens passively lets his Lord’s role in moving the axis of history wash over him.

Both narratives have a multi-generational scope though Butler takes this to a more drastic level through centuries of separation while Ishiguro deals with a closer span of time with the death of Stevens’s father. Both of these works also consider the inheritance of history. In The Remains of the Day, Stevens effectively inherits his consummate identity as a butler and a manservant from his father. Kindred curiously does not give the reader about Dana’s immediate background, and we really do not leave the story knowing very much about her in the present tense outside of her relationship with Kevin and her ambitions of novel writing. Instead, her character is bound by her blood connection to Rufus, who is only her ancestor through rape and subjugation of Alice, who functions as a kind of 19th century doppelganger for Dana. I think Kindred establishes through its sci-fi time travel the need in this narrative for Dana to uncover the truth of her background. Kindred, when viewed from a larger scope seems to be concerned with uncovering the suffering from and giving a story to Dana’s genealogy and background, whereas The Remains of the Day seems to be at its core an indictment of the moral passivity in how Stevens looks away from the larger impact of the ripples of his inaction.

 

Butler and White

Butler, Aburto, and Carlamusto express two different perspectives on History. Aburto and Carlamustro are two individuals reminiscing on the ActUp movement. In Kindred, Butler contemplates History by removing the speculation from retrospection. Aburto and Carlamustro are conscious of the fact that their History is not, to some extent, real anymore – there is finality to the tone of both speakers. Butler, however, places Dana in History directly; she is literally living, rather than remembering or hearing, it. This is different than Spiegleman and it is significantly different from Aburto and Carlamustro.

The idea of living within History is significant, first, for its objectivity. Memory is fallible and distorted. But we never doubt Dana’s account because we read it in the present tense. Carlamusto has her own film to check her objectiveness – though that objectiveness is certainly less dependable. Less dependable still is Aburto’s scattered, idealistic recounting of the movement “we were a part of.” The point is that Butler accomplishes a certain construction of objectivity by allowing history to take place in the modern characters life and not just her mind. The healthy doubt we apply to the memories of Aburto, Carlamustro, Ishiguro, Woolf, and, ultimately, to our own voices when we remember the past is not present in Kindred.

The effect of such strange objectivity in the modern perspective – and not just historical fiction – is similar to the effect of Amis’ temporal structure. Amis, by reversing time, forces us to confront familiar events in an unfamiliar way and thereby reconsider them. He places the familiar events of the Holocaust in reverse for the purpose of making the shock of each, simple atrocity – the pulling of teeth, the eugenics, the gassing – all the more horrific. While Butler doesn’t order her history backwards, she does allow us to explore it through the modern lens. How might a modern woman cope with the brutality?

The goal of this is obvious. Certainly events like the Holocaust and the Slave Era risk becoming abstract and meaningless: the stuff of textbooks. Even individual memory can become abstract and academic. For example, amidst his scattered monologue, Aburto dwells on the general sacrifice that arrested, Latino protesters made, by extrapolating a story about his friend who had to report his arrest to the school he wished to teach at in Florida. Carlamustro is more grounded in the singular event of her protest and the details, excitement, and surprise she both remembers and can verify. However, she still uses these details to touch on the more abstract nature of movement and urban space. Even Butler is able to touch on general systems of racism – like the Patrols, which she explains to Kevin.

But the essence of Kindred is that, just like the whipping of Alice’s Father, present experience demands much more emotional, spiritual, and, of course, physical comprehension. Despite all the movies and descriptions of violence, the whipping and the moans and the pleadings for mercy ring originally awful for Dana and, I think, for Butler’s audience too. With the typed words of Dana’s meta-dialogue about the time-travel and the startling racism and the liberation represented by her pants in world cloaked in oppression, we too walk through a species of personalized and modernized historical contemplation. In the context of Aburto and Carlamusto – who are remembering, and perhaps sugarcoating, their personal experiences but not necessarily reliving them – the effectiveness of such a formal tactic strikes clearly. 

Butler and White

In a way, Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a first-person American slave narrative, albeit an unusual one involving the time travel of Dana, a modern black woman from California, to a 19^th century Maryland plantation owned by one of her distant ancestors. Much of the first part of the novel is set on this plantation, and thus is also set within the historical time period in which American slavery existed. The protagonist, however, comes from 1970s California, and on every trip brings along with her the values, mindset, and sensibilities she developed within her own culture and society. The novel Kindred is itself a first-person narrative; the fact that the novel is in most part set within a the historical time period of American slavery also gives the novel a layer of the historical, though the status of the novel as simply a ‘historical novel’ is complicated by the fact that the protagonist is not of that time period.

To bring Kindred in relation to Hayden White’s “Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, it would be productive to understand how the novel might fit in within the framework White lays out. White defines narrativizing discourse as something separate from historical discourse – historical discourse is “a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it” while narrativizing discourse “feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story (White 6-7). That is, historical discourse reports events while narrativizing discourse portrays events as if they were telling the story themselves. Narrativizing discourse is thus a particular way of telling history, a way of representing history/historical events as full, coherent, and complete – whole in the way that we imagine the stories and narratives we tell to be whole. Turning back to Kindred, it is not entirely clear where the novel fits in this framework. In some ways the novel undoubtedy exhibits fictional storytelling – i.e., the very fact of time travel – but in other ways the novel exhibits a kind of factual (perhaps more historical) storytelling, at least in how it represents much of the oppression and hardship of slavery and racial tension.

It is possible that Dana’s status as a modern woman transported back in time to her distant ancestor’s plantation, and her subsequent narration of her experiences – which we experience by reading the novel – is also a comment on White’s idea that the impulse to narrativize always contains within it the impulse to moralize. White holds that “narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (White 18). He goes so far as to ask in the final sentence of his article if it is even at all possible to narrativize without moralizing, where moralizing is again defined as identifying reality or events of reality with a social system that we are able to imagine. Dana is the narrator of this novel, and she comes from a different time period – perhaps the very fact of her modern-ness and the narrativation of her story, which we experience as the novel itself, suggests Hayden’s claim that within narratization is the impulse to moralize. In her narratization of her story there is everywhere the impulse to moralize, to identify, compare, and ultimately judge the reality she experiences as a slave in America, which she will inevitably do given that her values, mindset, and sensibilities, are all borne out of a different social system. That, in turn, opens up a question as to how any narrativizing individual (whether narrativizing factually or fictionally) might also be moralizing events of reality, simply by virtue of being embedded within a social system that is different than the social system which bore the events being narrativized.

 

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. 25^th anniversary ed. Boton: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

White, Hayden. The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Print.

Butler and Freud

Octavia Butler explores memory’s confusing nature in Kindred, in which her main character, Dana, struggles to deal with the overwhelming experience of returning home after her trip to the antebellum south, where her husband is still trapped. Dana grapples with the dichotomy of her current comfort and her painful recollections, sometimes thinking about the situation at hand, sometimes thinking back to pleasanter times. Her inability to control her memories demonstrates both the tendency to remember happier, if unrelated, events when faced with crisis and the ease at which painful memories come back, even in the most unrelated circumstances.

When Dana first returns to the 1970s, she thinks about her husband’s marriage proposal, not their current separation (Butler 109). Although she takes pleasure from these memories, they have disturbing racial overtones when connected to their master/slave role-play which they had to assume while in the 1800s. She discusses how she would not let him support her while they dated because she wanted independence (108). She talks about how much it angered him when she refused to type his manuscripts (109). And although their interracial marriage is legal, their families did not approve (110). She emphasizes the memory’s details that deal most closely with slavery, labor, and racism, indirectly connecting past memories of her husband to their current situation.

Freud discusses a similar phenomenon called screen memories. Screen memories are memories that connect symbolically to other life events, allowing the subject to remember other, more painful events indirectly (Freud 243). For example, a man remembers how sweet a particular piece of bread once tasted, and that memory shields his fantasy of living a more comfortable, wealthy life (242). In Dana’s case, she remembers working for the employment agency as a source of independence (Butler 108), perhaps as a projection of her desires to escape her newfound slavery. But Freud would not classify Dana’s memories as screen memories per se, since they have both a thematic connection to her current plight and independent significance. A full-fledged screen memory’s “retention is due to the relation holding between its own subject-matter and a different one which has been suppressed” (Freud 234), and would therefore not be remembered on its own, without a suppressed memory to screen. Dana remembers her husband’s proposal as an outlet, not as a blockade.

Butler also explores how particularly traumatic memories can come up at the slightest, most loose provocation and at the most incongruous times. The sight of a blue-haired woman digging in her garden provokes Dana’s memories of the red-headed Margaret Weylin, who kept a beautiful garden without doing any of the work herself. The connection is slim, just flowers, but because Dana has suffered at Margaret’s hands, she immediately thinks about her at the sight of them. Dana also describes how disorienting and disturbing it is to remember certain things, such as a field hand’s whipping, in her apartment. The incongruity of her surroundings and her thoughts troubles her and leaves her physically ill (Butler 115). Some memories, it seems, have no screen, and they come up at the slightest provocation at seemingly inappropriate times.